Lars,
On Fri, 16 Nov 2007, Lars Aronsson wrote:
there, as a reserve for future meager years? If the interest rate is 4% then a fund which is 25 times bigger than the budget can support it in whole for ever. But even a smaller fund might be a good help. Should donors be given the option of giving to the current budget or giving to the fund? Has this been discussed?
This does come up from time to time. It is tremendously important. Being able to choose to give to a limited fund or trust for core sustenance would be a great thing.
I would fundraise aggressively for a trust to support core Wikipedia sustenance for the next century. [ditto for a supporting trust for public.resource.org -- Carl Malamud, call your office.]
As it stands, I am anxious that we don't talk every season about reserves and contingencies. When I had limited input into budg discussions in 2004 and 2005, I cared primarily that reserves were always budgeted for and that they increased over time. I have no idea whether this has continued... back then we were targeting a reserve to cover 3 months of operating expenses, as a bare minimum. It hadn't yet reached that mark by the time quarterly budget details stopped being transparent.
Having a proper trust set up would be far better. But this takes work to cleanly define its scope and structure.
Two related tangents :
* we as a community should be able to bring down the cost of core maintenance each year, through innovations in technology and the good will of dozens of global partners; making our collective work as robust as possible to bankruptcy, war, greed, and other human quirks. Focusing on what that core costs may help highlight good work in this area.
* true robustness requires maintaining and caring about reliable full and incremental dumps. image and full-history en dumps are hard to come by these days... and these immediate issues receive much less air time than discussions of new R&D (which are more exciting as news; there's nothing very exciting about spectacular uptime and trouble-free maintenance).
SJ